Human rights vanish for people who lack their own sovereign government
Evidence
The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable—even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them—whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state. To this fact, disturbing enough in itself, one must add the confusion created by the many recent attempts to frame a new bill of human rights, which have demonstrated that no one seems able to define with any assurance what these general human rights, as distinguished from the rights of citizens, really are. Although everyone seems to agree that the plight of these people consists precisely in their loss of the Rights of Man, no one seems to know which rights they lost when they lost these human rights. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 714 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: The nation-state’s inability to protect the stateless lets persecutors impose their values; Deprivation of rights compounds irreversibly once a person is rendered stateless; National emancipation came to be seen as a precondition for human rights (+14 more)
Related
- Modern statelessness strips rights more radically than medieval outlawry ever did (similarity 0.92)
- Inalienable human rights prove unenforceable for anyone outside a sovereign state (similarity 0.90)
- The inalienable rights of the abstract individual were immediately fused with national sovereignty (similarity 0.89)
- Human-rights advocacy aimed at individuals fails against mass statelessness and discredits itself. (similarity 0.88)
- Complete rightlessness is created before the right to live is threatened (similarity 0.86)
- Human rights are only protected in practice by one’s own sovereign state. (similarity 0.84)
- The Rights of Man were only ever enforced as national rights, not universal ones (similarity 0.83)
- The legal order presupposes every person must belong to some deportable territory (similarity 0.83)
- Loss of human rights reduces persons to insignificant bare uniqueness (similarity 0.83)
- Rights are exercised through group membership like citizenship, not universal humanity (similarity 0.82)
- Loss of national rights and human rights are experienced as identical by the stateless. (similarity 0.81)
Broader Connections
- Inalienable human rights prove unenforceable for anyone outside a sovereign state
#corroborates(0.95) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 714 - Loss of human rights reduces persons to insignificant bare uniqueness
#expands(0.82) - Human-rights advocacy aimed at individuals fails against mass statelessness and discredits itself.
#expands(0.80) - Universalistic norms lose force without status-group exclusionary sanctions behind them.
#corroborates(0.75) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 271 - Political freedom at the state level coexisted with extreme individual restriction in communal Russia
#exemplifies(0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 619